1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of collaborative computing and more particularly to the configuration of a collaborative content.
2. Description of the Related Art
The rapid development of the Internet has led to advanced modes of communication and collaboration. Using the Internet as a backbone, individuals worldwide can converge in cyberspace to share ideas, documents and images in a manner not previously possible through conventional telephony and video conferencing. To facilitate collaboration over the Internet, a substantial collection of technologies and protocols have been assembled to effectively deliver audio, video and data over the single data communications medium of the Internet. These technologies include document libraries, instant messaging, chat rooms, and application sharing.
Conventional collaborative computing includes combinations of collaborative technologies in order to provide a means for members of a collaborative community to pool their strengths and experiences to achieve a common goal. For instance, a common goal can include an educational objective, the completion of a software development project or even the creation and use of a system to manage human resources. A collaborative computing environment generally can be defined by (1) a particular context, i.e. the objective of the environment, (2) membership, i.e., the participants in the environment, (3) a set of roles for the members, and (4) resources and tools which can be accessed by the membership in furtherance of the objective of the environment. Roles are names given to the people in the environment which dictate access to the resources and tools within the environment as well as define the behavior of the community members.
Collaborative computing environments typically can be customized by the developer of each environment in order to meet the needs both of developers and users. For instance, several customized collaborative computing environments have been created such as team workspaces, e-meetings, virtual classrooms and virtual communities. Notably, each of these types of environments has implemented using shared resources as a building block to create the environment. Nevertheless, customized collaborative computing environments can be rigid and immutable due to their customization.
Shared resources for all environments have general characteristics such as a purpose/title, and the premise that these environments can be created, deleted, cloned, renamed, expired, archived and restored. Shared resources may also be customized to fulfill the objectives of the environment. For example, virtual classrooms employ the general characteristics of the shared resources but further specialize the shared resources in the areas of defining membership roles, e.g., teacher, student, etc., the definition of content, e.g., courses, and provide a shared resource directory customized in the form of a list of courses.
Current customized collaborative computing environments must each be developed and configured individually, that is, each instance of a collaborative computing environment can only be of one customized type, e.g., a virtual classroom. As such, present systems require that each separate computing environment be developed from the ground up, even though the separate environments may have the need for common business processes, e.g., stock quotations, web conferencing interface, news, etc. Put another way, known collaborative computing systems do not provide a way to create an environment in which arbitrary business process objects can be placed and customized to fit the needs of the desired environment.
Importantly, collaboration cannot always be modeled as a static relationship between the membership, roles, resources and tools. Rather, in many cases, collaboration can involve a workflow. As is known in the art, workflow systems can include a sequence of steps required to meet a particular objective. In the collaborative computing context, so too can a collaborative objective include a sequence of steps. At each step, the membership, roles, resources and tools can change. Yet, the static nature of conventional collaborative systems cannot accommodate the notion of workflow so as to accurately produce a comfortable environment for achieving the collaborative objective of the collaborative system.